2024: Year in Review

Insights from Eugene Grinberg, SOLVE Co-Founder & CEO

The key achievement of 2024 is the launch of SOLVE Px™, our predictive pricing model for the Municipal bond markets. Reflecting on our progress this year reminds me of the founding of SOLVE.

Every founder remembers their first one. The date, the day of the week, and the customer that finally signs the agreement to become a paying client, validating many months of hard work and self-doubt. For SOLVE, it was May 17th, 2012. It was a Thursday. And I distinctly remember our loud fist pumps and high fives as if it were just yesterday.

It is a special feeling. The preceding twelve months flash through your mind: the clandestine meetings with your co-founder, walking away from a safe and successful career for reasons you can’t fully articulate, the first brainstorming sessions filled with too many ideas and no clear direction, the late nights, the guilt of missing family time, the countless meetings with anyone willing to listen, the MVP, the implementations that would sometimes fail – requiring you to fix coding errors and recompile right in the client’s office.

Many years later, we have a much larger team, and the wins are more frequent and usually larger than that first one. And while you continue to remind yourself not to take any of it for granted and celebrate each one, you can never truly match that thrill again.

However, watching SOLVE Px get built from the ground up would often take me back to those early days. It was a new type of product – there was no formula, no playbook.

We had asked the team to get Beta out by December of 2023, and with many late nights, they met that deadline. The product was nowhere near production-ready – but that was the point. Don’t build it in a vacuum. Get as many eyeballs on it, as early as possible. Fail fast and build what matters.

Twelve months later, I could not be prouder of our team and all we had accomplished. The quality of the AI model’s predictive ability, the breadth of client-facing visualizations and relative value features, the APIs, the internal dashboards, the whitepapers and other product marketing collateral all reflect a product that is remarkably mature.

The feedback from early-adopter clients has been remarkable. As we prepare to launch a third major version of the AI model, it is evident that it is performing significantly better than competing models. The largest differentiator is our Quotes data, which contributes to about 35% of the predictive quality and something that others won’t be able to replicate given the uniqueness of our data.

This truly has been a win shared by the entire team – with virtually every person having some role in the launch. Between ensuring that the best quality data was being fed into the AI, to the countless R&D hours by the AI, product, engineering, QA, and dev ops teams. All the collateral and training of the go-to-market team. Countless hours by many educating the market on the “whys” and the “hows” of what we were building and the ultimate ROI for the customers. Massive investment.

Just as importantly, the playbook we’re building will not only continue to expand the current product’s capabilities but also help push into more asset classes.

I am excited to see what 2025 brings!

About SOLVE

SOLVE is the leading market data platform provider for Fixed-Income securities, trusted by sophisticated buy-side and sell-side firms worldwide. Founded in 2011, SOLVE leverages its AI-driven technology and deep industry expertise to offer unparalleled transparency into markets, reduce risk, and save hundreds of hours across front-office workflows. With the largest real-time datasets for Securitized Products, Municipal Bonds, Corporate Bonds, Syndicated Bank Loans, Convertible Bonds, CDS, and Private Credit, SOLVE empowers clients to transform the way they bring new securities to market, trade on secondary markets, and value highly illiquid securities. Headquartered in New York, with offices across the globe, SOLVE is the definitive source for market pricing in Fixed-Income markets.